


waiting

by thirtyspells (weatherveyn)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Shippy if you Squint, headcanons for halos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-07
Updated: 2012-09-07
Packaged: 2017-11-13 18:10:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/506279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weatherveyn/pseuds/thirtyspells
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Michael waits for Gabriel, but Gabriel never comes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	waiting

After Lucifer Fell, Michael retreated to kneel before his Father’s empty Throne and waited for Gabriel to blow the Horn. It wasn’t until much later, when Raphael came to ask for orders, that Michael learned Gabriel had left.

Raphael said  _dead. Gabriel is dead_ , but Michael knew better – knew Gabriel better. He could remember the tenor of Gabriel’s heartbreak and grief on the battlefield, could remember having to step between Gabriel and Lucifer because Gabriel wouldn’t break his defensive – wouldn’t strike to kill – even when Lucifer left holes wide open in his own defenses and struck for his heart.

Gabriel wasn’t dead, he was just running. He was running from the reality – the  _destiny_  – that Michael had already accepted; running from the duty that fell to him, to call in the End of Days and Lucifer’s death. Eventually, Michael knew, his brother would realise the truth and accept it and return. Gabriel would blow the Horn and Lucifer would fall, and Michael’s task would finally be  _over_.

Until then, Michael could let him run. Gabriel needed time, and Michael could wait.

 

It was several thousand years before Michael went looking for Gabriel – not to demand his return, but because he missed the feeling of Gabriel’s Grace threading through his, tweaking his wings and lingering companionably at the heart of him.

He felt out Gabriel’s presence and found it very faint. For a moment he was concerned, but the feeling passed quickly – Gabriel was running, of course he would have to dim the light of his Grace to hide from their siblings – and he spread his wings to fly. Landing was like being immersed in Gabriel again, and the shock of it after so long was enough that he didn’t immediately notice what was wrong. The trees and plants and creatures around him were teeming with Gabriel’s distinctive Grace, wild and vibrant and fiercely  _alive_  – but Gabriel was not there.

It was only an afterimage; a tiny fraction of his brother’s being cast off long ago.

(There was another place, further south, where the land was nothing but rock and ice and very few creatures could cling to life. It was a dead place where things changed very slowly or not at all, and walking across it was like entering a void. This was the place where Lucifer cast off his halo, that mark of obedience to their Father, just as surely as this rainforest was where Gabriel cast his aside.)

Michael thought, calmly, of Heaven’s tiny machinations – the guiding hand leading the world oh-so-slowly to its inevitable end – and decided that Gabriel had been running long enough.

 

After Lucifer Rose, Michael retreated to the place the humans called the Amazon, where the Grace of his brother’s discarded halo beat like a pulse, and waited for Gabriel to blow the Horn. He wandered between the trees, brushing his Grace against the vestiges of his brother’s, and wondered if Gabriel knew that humanity was slowly destroying him, that they cut down the trees born from him, burned the earth and poisoned the rivers, killed the creatures that thrived because of him.

Michael waited there until he heard his Vessel call, waiting for another call that would never come, and then spread his wings.

The boy he found waiting was not the one he had been promised, but he thought of the slow destruction humanity was wreaking on his brother, of the battle that would soon be over, and decided the time for waiting had passed.


End file.
